Chasing the Crossover: One
by Carlanime
Summary: An AU in which Chase encounters a patient whose problems aren't so much medical as supernatural. Warnings: Crackfic, Alternate Universe, Crossover. Spoilers for Season Four.
1. One

Cameron caught up to him outside ICU, while he was scrubbing up. "We need to talk," she said. Her eyes rested for a moment on the small silver cross he was wearing around his neck, and he knew she was probably wondering where it had come from. It was, in fact, a gift from a recent patient, but if Selvaggio's present caused Cameron a twinge of jealousy, that was karma at work, right?

"There's nothing to talk about," Chase said, his voice crisp with detachment. He felt a hint of self-satisfaction at that, which he knew probably showed—not that he cared; there was no reason to conceal it, and he never wasted energy dissembling when there was nothing to be gained. He entered the ICU and, to his faint annoyance, Cameron followed. "You shouldn't be in here," he told her, and turned his attention to the patient.

"Abdominal pain and vomiting for the last week or so, according to his mother," one of the nurses said, glancing curiously at Cameron. "She wanted him to come in sooner, but he insisted it was nothing serious. Then he started experiencing difficulty breathing. His heartrate's down to 40 bpm..." Chase tuned her out slightly so her could look at the patient himself. The teenager twitching and writhing on the bed was thin, but muscled; his pallid skin shone with sweat, and his lips were ominously blue. Then again, his hair was a shade of black that strongly implied dye, and he was wearing eyeliner, so the blue lips might be down to cosmetics rather than cyanosis.

"Bloodwork?" Chase asked, and the nurse shook her head. "Then start there—check his blood oxygen levels, test for drugs."

"The mother says he doesn't use drugs; she says he works out all the time, and takes his health very seriously," the nurse interrupted, and Chase tried to conceal his impatience. Presumably the mother was the plump, sobbing woman seated next to the boy's bed; she didn't look capable of giving a coherent history, and he very much doubted she knew what her son got up to in his spare time.

"Let's check anyway," he said, forcing a charming smile, but the ICU nurse failed to look particularly charmed; probably she'd dealt with enough professionally condescending charm to last a lifetime. He modified the smile to something more collegial and less overtly flirtatious.

"You've been avoiding me for days," Cameron said, and Chase and the nurse gave her oddly similar exasperated looks. "We need to talk before things get any worse." Her eyes shone with sincerity. Chase wondered how she could fail so completely to understand that, having failed to win the thing he was playing for—her devotion, her undivided loyalty—he had no interest in playing at all. Once a goal was scratched, it held absolutely zero interest for him; how could she not have noticed that?

The boy sat stiffly up in the bed, retching horribly, and vomited. Everyone in the room froze, unable to look away, and the kid's mother started to shriek hysterically. Her hysteria was understandable: her son had spewed a mass of semi-digested bugs. Chase could recognize, without particularly trying or wanting to, several spiders and grasshoppers.

"This?" he said to Cameron, after a moment's silence, "is not a good time to talk." To the nurse he said calmly, "I need that bloodwork to include measurement of his acetyl cholinesterase levels. Add anticoagulant to the drawn samples and get them to the lab as quickly as possible. And send down a sample of his urine to be tested for organophosphates and carbamate." He eyed the mother with unconcealed distaste, but there was nothing for it: she was the best, and easiest, way to find out if the boy had been exposed to pesticides. If the insects he'd been eating had had a bioaccumulation of pesticides, that would explain all his symptoms, and the sooner they could start treatment the better—exposure through ingestion could prove fatal.

He'd spent too long working with House, Chase reflected. There'd been a time when solving the immediate problem of diagnosing and treating the observable symptoms would have been enough; task completed, Chase would have walked away without a second thought. Now, however, he found himself puzzling over the larger picture. Why had this kid been eating insects in the first place? He grimaced as the mother's wails grew louder, but resigned himself to interviewing her anyway.


	2. Two

**Warnings:** Written following season four, and thus may contain spoilers for any episode up to and including the end of episode 4.16.

**Disclaimer:** I obviously don't own these characters, and have no intention of profitting from this.

It was that niggling curiousity as to why, exactly, a teenaged boy would have a stomach full of creepy-crawlies that sent Chase to the patient's room a few days later. He already knew that his diagnosis had been confirmed: it had been carbamate poisoning. The kid had had his stomach washed out and been given activated charcoal; he was now responding well to the proscribed Robinul. Chase had, additionally, ordered a course of pralidoxime to reactivate the patient's acetylcholinesterase. There was no reason, really, why he needed to see the patient again.

And yet, here he was, and to the evident delight of the boy's three visitors: stunning teenage girls, one each in blonde, brunette, and redhead, who eyed Chase with openly hungry looks that had him blushing from the moment he walked in the door. He tried to ignore them, and fixed his gaze on the patient. "You're looking well," he said, his voice unconvincingly jocular even to his own ears. The damned girls giggled, and he felt his ears grow hot as the blush worsened.

"You wouldn't like to tell me why you were eating the bugs, would you?" Chase asked, now in a hurry to get this over with.

"The blood is the life. I've grown stronger, these past few months," the boy said, and Chase had the distinct impression he was playing to the peanut gallery. For one thing, he'd put on a solemn look of teenaged intensity; for another, he'd carefully glanced at the three girls to see how they were reacting to his proclamation. Chase grinned slightly, amused and sympathetic, but right now getting information from the patient took priority over the patient's quest to get laid.

"You lot," he said, making the effort required to resume control of this situation. "Out." He gestured to the door, and stood waiting until they got to their feet and straggled out.

"Anything you say, doctor," the redhead whispered as they passed him, and the other two giggled. Chase flushed again, uncomfortably, and felt distinct relief when he'd shut the door behind them. Clearly, he thought, he'd gone without for too long; he wasn't usually this susceptible. He pulled his attention back to the matter at hand.

"So you've been eating insects for months?" Chase asked, eyeing the patient. "Um, a lot of insects?"

"I need to consume life. It gives me strength," the patient insisted, still sounding melodramatic. When Chase failed to look impressed he sighed heavily "I don't eat anything but protein," he explained, in a much less stagey voice. "I'm trying to build muscle mass and gain strength, okay? I don't want to put on any fat. So, yeah: I eat a lot of insects. You know, pound for pound, bugs provide more available protein 

and fatty acids than traditional livestock, and they're higher in some vitamins and minerals."

It made sense, in a way; this kid was so skinny he didn't have a lot of fat for the pesticide to accumulate in, so presumably he had been eating the things in, well, bulk. "So you're primarily eating insects for your health?" Chase asked, mildly amused.

"Not just my health," the boy said self-importantly. "For the health of the planet. Eating lower down the food chain benefits us all."

Chase's grin widened at the familiar hectoring tone of youthful morality. "Except when we inadvertently poison ourselves," he couldn't resist pointing out.

The boy scowled, and sank lower in the bed. "That was an accident, and it wasn't my fault," he said. "If corrupt multinationals didn't push biotoxins, and if bourgeois homeowners obsessed with their suburban lawns didn't obediently buy them, none of this would have happened.

"So before you started spewing," Chase asked, "did the girls find your bug-eating attractive?"

"Why do you want to know?" the kid sneered. "The exotic foreigner angle not working for you, Accent Boy? Go ask them yourself." He jerked a contemptuous thumb towards the window, through which his fan club could be seen, standing pressed against the glass.

When Chase looked up, the three of them licked the glass, slowly, and then dissolved into silent mocking laughter. Then they abruptly stepped back half a pace, looking much younger and less threatening, and a minute later the boy's mother approached. That was weird, Chase thought. It wasn't strange that they were trying to look more respectable in front of a parent—he'd done that often enough himself—but they'd seemed to know that the patient's mother was nearby before they could have seen her. And they hadn't even turned to look.

"How is he?" the mother asked anxiously, hurrying to the bedside and beginning a series of fussy, fluttering gestures to which her son reacted with obvious annoyance. He pushed her rudely away as she tried to fluff his pillow, and brushed her off when she tried to smooth his hair.

"He's doing well, Mrs. Renfield," Chase said, but without summoning any of his smiles. He almost felt sorry for the little snot, really. Tough luck, having his three girlfriends watch while his unattractive mother coddled him.

"My Master will help me," the boy muttered feverishly. Chase stopped, halfway across the room. "Our Master is coming, and He will make me strong." As he spoke the girls flattened themselves against the glass again, as if in response, though Chase knew they couldn't have heard.

"What Master?" Chase asked, more sharply than he'd intended. The patient, whose mother had 

responded to his rebuffs by sitting in the chair next to the bed and beginning to cry, seemed oblivious.

"He's coming," the boy repeated triumphantly, "and he will make me strong." The mere thought had made him strong enough to push his mother away, Chase reflected approvingly, but with a feeling of unease he wondered if this were merely an adolescent's compensatory fantasy, or another symptom.


	3. Three

Chase had been prepared for another onslaught of the pack of teenage girls when he left the patient's room, but they were sitting demurely in a row of chairs against the far wall, ankles crossed and eyes cast down on the books they held in their laps. It made a pretty picture, and for a brief moment he admired the sight, when suddenly he was accosted by a familiar voice.

"You were happy enough to discuss it in front of House's candidates," Cameron said crossly. "You owe me a chance to talk."

"I don't owe you anything," Chase said calmly, "and you don't owe me anything either—not even an explanation. I understand what happened. I don't want to talk about it."

She looked annoyed rather than pleased. "You can't possibly understand if we haven't talked."

Chase sighed heavily. "You've been in love with House for ages," he said, ticking each point off on his fingers as he spoke, and shaking his head in admonition when she looked ready to argue that first statement, "and his neediness recently, shall we say, peaked: he actually tried to kill himself. You don't listen to anybody's rational explanations when you've made up your mind there's some Deep Emotional Cause, so I doubt you bought the story that he was test-driving a near death experience. You probably decided he was suffering more than ever...and comforting him proved irresistible." Cameron opened her mouth to speak, but closed it again. "And for him," Chase went on bitterly, "the chance to screw me over was probably even more irresistible. You were just a convenient means to an end."

Cameron glared. "How dare you?" she asked, infuriated. Chase shrugged unemotionally.

"Might as well be honest," he said, almost cheerfully. "Nothing to lie about now, is there?" He felt relieved, actually, not to be in love anymore. Wanting to bang her, that he could handle. Being in love? Not possible, now that he knew it hadn't been what he'd thought it was, not for her. The knowledge that he'd failed to make her love him enough that House wasn't a factor was sickening, but he'd get over it, as he always did: he'd walk away unscathed, shrug it off, try something else.

"House wasn't the only one," Cameron said abruptly, her face cold and angry. Chase gaped at her.

"What?" he asked, with a gasp of shock that was almost like laughter.

"He wasn't the only one," she repeated, and spun on her heels and walked away, leaving him staring after her. He made an exasperated noise and turned to walk in the opposite direction.  
The three girls, he saw, were staring at him, expressions brimful of adoring pity. If they were just a little older, he thought grimly, he'd take them up on that, as a distraction.

"They're an improvement over the nine year old," Foreman's voice cut into his thoughts, and Chase looked up, startled, "but seriously: can you not stick to your own age group?" Chase grinned back.

"I wasn't," he protested, then gave it up. "I have a medical interest in them."

"I bet you do," Foreman said, in a tone of utter disbelief.

"No, actually, I do," Chase said. "They're friends of a kid I'm treating for organophosphate poisoning, and, well, the whole group of them are acting so oddly I'm beginning to wonder if something else is wrong."

Foreman looked back at the girls, disinterested. All three watched him with looks of intensity, but he shook his head slightly as he turned his attention back to Chase. "Judging by the clothes and the attitude, they're typical suburban teenagers—a little more Goth than average, but they don't look sick. Unless you want to treat them for Affluenza, maybe."

"Could you just...come talk to the boy for a moment?" Chase asked. "I'd like your opinion."

Foreman looked impatient, but nodded, and walked with Chase back to Renfield's room. Once there, however, it took less than ten minutes' conversation before Foreman beckoned Chase back into the hallway.

"C'mon," Foreman said, hovering between laughter and exasperation. "Are you having me on?" Chase looked blank. "They're a bunch of Goth kids trying to freak out the adults by playing Dracula."

Chase was abashed. "Bug eating," he said, shaking his head. "I never even thought of it. I suppose they got the idea from his name." He was trying to sound amused, but his embarrassment was obvious, and Foreman's poorly-suppressed amusement wasn't helping. "I was worried his obsession with being strong meant he had some real form of body dysmorphic disorder, most likely muscle dysmorphia. I should come back after his mum leaves and strangle the little bastard," Chase said, shooting a disgusted look at the boy's three co-conspirators.

"You need a coffee," Foreman said, sympathetically. "Clear some cobwebs out of your head."


	4. Four

The nagging sense that _something was wrong_ wouldn't go away, though. Chase was normally out the door the instant his shifts ended; tonight, for some reason, he caught himself heading to young Mr. Renfield's room, just to have one last look, one last conversation.

The ward was quiet when he got there, and the corridor was deserted, which was odd. Chase cast a puzzled glance down the empty hall, which should have been quietly bustling even at this hour. He felt slightly uneasy, and impatiently told himself that he was just feeling a little unnerved still from the game-playing of the patient and his friends. Remembering how they'd played him was an instant cure for his apprehension.

He entered the patient's room and stopped near the foot of the bed, disappointed. Renfield was sound asleep, looking thin and childlike in the moonlight that fell across his pillow. There was, Chase knew, no rational excuse for waking him. He tried to throw off his curiosity, tried to tell himself that this was a good thing—a reason to stop wasting time here and go home. He shivered in the breeze, and then glanced sharply at the window, wondering how there could be a breeze. The windows up here didn't even open, did they?

But this one was open: the glass itself had been removed, as cleanly as a canvas cut from a frame. Chase moved numbly towards the gaping hole in the wall, bewildered. They were on the third floor. Why had a patient been left in this room? It wasn't safe. Chase blinked down at the ground, feeling dazed. The night air swirled in, rattling the blinds, and coiled itself lovingly around his ankles, cold and damp and caressing.

And then there was a horrible hissing sound from behind him, and Chase turned, and realized he was surrounded. It was the three Goth girls, the patient's little friends, but there was nothing cute about them by moonlight. Now they looked hard-eyed and adult, and overtly sexual, and threatening. He felt himself freeze, unexpectedly horrified by them. Their faces bore expressions of such unholy desire that they looked barely human; they were like things from a nightmare. He shrank back, barely knowing what it was he feared, his throat instantly too dry to shout for help. "It's the pretty one," the redhead murmured delightedly. "Doesn't he look delicious?"

For a long still moment there was only the terror, and the slow inexorable approach of the creatures as they closed in, and worst of all his own shameful physical reaction to the lascivious way they licked their lips and eyed him. The blonde stepped forward boldly, and with a gurgling laugh said that she would have his first kisses. "But," she assured the others teasingly, "he is very young and blond. There are kisses for us all."

Sickeningly, he found himself feeling almost willing to be prey to them. He waited in an agony of anticipation, loathing himself for the flood of mingled desire and revulsion. And then there was a firm, solid presence at his back, though Chase had not seen or heard anyone enter the room. His knees weakened with relief.

He couldn't pull his eyes away from the girls to see who it was that stood so close behind him that they were almost touching, but he could tell it was a man, someone taller than Chase, and someone, too, whose presence caused the three fiends to shrink back, dropping their eyes in obeisance. Chase drew a deep, ragged breath.  


"How dare you?" said the man behind Chase, his voice quiet but furious. The three females cast fluttering looks of cringing apology past Chase as the stranger went on, "You know I have forbidden you to touch him. How dare you even look at him? He is mine."

What the _hell_? Chase wondered, but before he could turn or speak he felt impossibly strong arms go around him, one around his chest, pulling him back firmly to lean against the man; the other gripped his throat. But at the instant of contact there was a sharp cry of pain, and Chase was released. He stumbled with the sudden removal of support, falling to one knee before he could regain his balance, and almost swooning with a wave of vertigo. When he looked up they were gone: all three girls, and whoever else had been in the room, had simply vanished. The room was dark, almost as if smoke or soot hung in the air, but it was unmistakably empty of anyone other than Chase and the still-sleeping patient.

"Weird," Chase said out loud. The room felt too large, and too empty, for his voice. He stood up and rubbed his throat with one shaking hand, his fingers closing around the dangling silver cross. He'd all but forgotten he was wearing it until now. He frowned, and then made up his mind that this was going to have to be one of those things he didn't confide to anyone.


	5. Five

There were lots of places Chase would have been glad to see a familiar face, but ICU wasn't one of them. And yet there was Renfield, intubated and ventilated and surrounded by beeping monitors. They'd discharged the kid last night; he'd been fine. Chase sighed, and picked up the patient's chart.

"I saw him being brought in," Foreman said behind him, and Chase turned, happy enough at the sight of this particular face. "His mother said he just suddenly got worse. Sweating, vomiting—"

"Insects?" Chase interrupted, shuddering briefly. Foreman grinned.

"Not this time, no. Just blood. But by the time she got him to the hospital he was convulsing, and he lost consciousness. His BP's way below normal. We're waiting on arterial gas results, but my guess is, he's overdosed on something again. The whole thing happened quickly—if the mother's account is accurate, it's been less than an hour."

"But why?" Chase asked. "What happened?"

Foreman shrugged. "Maybe he missed you." Chase snorted, but once he had the results of Renfield's bloodwork in his hands he saw that there'd been an element of truth in the remark: this probably wasn't an accidental overdose. The kid's blood CO2 content was below 8 mEq/1, suggesting his blood had become dangerously acidic. "Salicylic acid poisoning," Chase muttered to himself. "The idiot's tried to off himself with aspirin."

He tersely ordered further blood tests to determine Renfield's precise serum salicylate levels; in the meantime, airway-protected gastric lavage would remove any undigested aspirin tablets, and blood transfusions would begin to restore his blood pressure.

Chase worked quickly, his demeanour misleadingly calm, his every move efficient and to the point. He looked focused and competent; he felt chilled, and disturbed, and somewhere beneath it all, guilty. He hated this kind of case, hated being confronted with someone so young, and yet so miserable that suicide seemed preferable to life. He automatically deflected his thoughts away from himself at that age, but that left him confronting the not much more comfortable thought that this might be, in some measure, his fault: he should have stuck with his instinct that there was something more wrong with Renfield than simple insecticide poisoning. The coincidence of the surname and the bug-eating seemed less like a prank now; even teenagers didn't overdose in an effort to be funny. There was something sinister here, some underlying delusion or obsession.

But for now, just keeping the patient alive took precedence over everything else. Intensive care wasn't the place for dwelling on underlying emotional issues, thank God. The coma indicated the kid's central nervous system had been affected, so barbiturates were off the board; succinylcholine would be safer, since the patient wasn't hypoglycaemic—precise blood readings would be damned useful, though. Absorbed in the swift minutiae of a situation that would cause the average person to panic, Chase calmed from the inside out, his occasional quickly shouted orders not an indication of distress but of purely purposeful energy.


	6. Six

Crossing the lobby to leave, his satchel swung over his shoulder, Chase looked impossibly young, which accounted for the security guard asking him, "Are you with them? I told you kids to leave."

"I work here," Chase answered, annoyed, and the guard looked sheepish as he recognized Chase as someone he saw regularly.

"Sorry," the guard said. "It's just I've had to remove those girls three times already, and I'm beginning to hate all young people. I finally had to tell them they just weren't welcome here. Not that I expect they'll listen to that once I'm out of sight." Chase looked where he nodded, and saw Renfield's three friends were just outside the glass doors of the main entrance, staring sullenly in. He felt a brief chill of apprehension at the sight of them, but in the sunlight they looked young and harmless. I must really have been overtired last night, if I imagined they were a threat, he thought, astonished at himself for the overreaction. They were practically children.

"Worried about your friend?" Chase asked the girls gently as he stepped outside. The redhead snorted with derision; all three looked bored, as if Chase had said something impossibly stupid.

"Why would we be?" the brunette asked. "He doesn't matter to us."

"He mattered to you a couple of days ago," Chase said, but they just shrugged. Shaking his head, Chase walked away. He didn't have the energy or interest required to make sense of the complicated ins and outs of teenage relationships.

* * * * * * *

The next day Chase swung by House's hospital room, hoping House would be awake and bored enough to want to help him diagnose Renfield. Weirdly, Renfield's friends seemed to have had the same urge. This time the teenage trio were sitting on the floor, their backs against the wall. "I know you're worried," he told them, torn between annoyance and amusement, "but there's no way Doctor House is going to discuss a patient 's case with you. Look, why don't you go downstairs? You can at least be outside the window, so he can see you if he's awake.

"I told you," the brunette said impatiently, "we don't care about Renfield anymore. He's not important now."

"Why not?" Chase asked, not really expecting an answer.

"Our Master has found a new servant," the redhead said, and Chase found himself shivering, disturbed by the note of fanaticism in her voice. "Someone more powerful, and more valuable. Renfield is of no further use to him."

"Did that...make Renfield sick?" Chase asked cautiously, trying to find some reasonable thread to this conversation.

The blonde tossed her hair. "It made him despair," she said. "He knows he has no purpose now."

With relief Chase noticed two security guards heading briskly down the hallway. He ducked into House's room as the guards began hustling the girls to their feet. House was sitting up in bed.

"Couldn't you try dating someone your own age?" House asked. "Oh wait, you did, but she preferred someone my age. Oops."

Chase refused to be drawn. "I need your help," he said.

House shook his head. "Can't. Cuddy's forbidden me to take any cases."

"I just need an opinion," Chase began, but House shook his head again.

"Not now," House said firmly. "Not when I can't trust myself." Chase opened his mouth to argue, wanting to point out that being incapacitated had never kept House off a case before, but something about House's expression informed him it would be futile. He left, feeling worried. It wasn't like House to mistrust his own judgement. Had the coma affected him, or was this something else—grief, maybe, or guilt? Chase knew only too well how hard those could shake your deepest faith; perhaps House's faith in his own intellect had been another casualty.


	7. Seven

Chase was sleeping. The flickering light from the television cast an eerie light on his face; he'd been too wide awake to go to bed, at first, and then abruptly too tired to get up off the couch.

He lay perfectly still, not twitching or moaning, but he was dreaming. In the dream, he was back in Renfield's first hospital room, the wind from the missing window cold against his back until, abruptly, the chill was blocked by whoever had stood behind him.

Now there was a deeper, more penetrating cold than anything the wind could manage. Chase shivered in his sleep, remembering the details he'd been too shocked to concentrate on at the time. The inhumanly hard arm tightened around Chase's chest, pulling him back, and again he heard that voice. "He is mine."

This time he recognized it. Chase awoke, gasping for breath, drenched with the sweat of irrational terror. He'd known that voice; how could he have ever failed to recognize it? He heard that voice every day.

But he couldn't have heard it that night in Renfield's room, he decided as he calmed himself. That was impossible. It must have been the dream, taking elements from his life and blurring them horribly into that nightmare visit to Renfield.

* * * * * * *

The next morning, Princeton-Plainsboro was humming with energy. Chase could feel it as soon as he walked in the door, even though he hadn't yet seen Cuddy. When he did, it was obvious the shock of energy emanated from her, as though the hospital were an extension of her own nervous system, vibrating with whatever had etched that stricken look on her face. His instinct was to ask her what was going on, but she was deep in conversation with two uniformed police officers.

He wondered, briefly, if this was something to do with his own odd case, but dismissed the thought. It was too easy to assume that whatever was central to your own life must also be preoccupying every other member of staff.

It was Cameron who told him, finally, approaching him as he stood in line to grab a much-needed coffee. "Have you heard about pediatrics?" she asked, and he automatically braced himself for the impact of someone else's emotions, a response he'd perfected in his own childhood. But she wasn't, for once, overly upset. "The past three nights, children have gone missing from the pediatrics ward. They've been finding them down in the lobby, crying. No one knows who's letting them off the ward."

"Have they asked the kids?" It was what Chase would have done first, himself.

"They're saying," Cameron hesitated, as if aware how ludicrous this would sound, "that the kids all claim a strange, bitchy lady has been coming into their rooms at night, and she took them away."

Chase couldn't help it; burst out laughing. Cameron glared at him, but that didn't help him stop any sooner. "Are they sure it was a lady?" he asked, when he could talk again. "Maybe it was House in drag."

"It's not funny," Cameron protested weakly, but she was smiling slightly. "Cuddy thinks these might have been kidnapping attempts."

He sobered at that. "The kids are saying she tried to take them out of the hospital?"

"The kids are saying a lot of things. That she tried to take them home with her; that she tried to bite them.."

"Bite them?" The note of incredulity had slipped back into his voice.

Cameron looked up at him, shadows of exhaustion under her eyes. "They aren't making it up, Chase. Two of them had neck wounds. More like punctures than bites, but still, they're not wrong that she's been trying to hurt them, whoever she is."

But he hadn't been about to accuse them of making it up. Something else entirely had struck him, finally. "I have to see to one of my patients," he said abruptly, and dashed off without waiting for a reply. Cameron stared after him, annoyed. He didn't look back; he'd moved past caring, perhaps.

He took the stairs two at a time. Renfield's Dracula fantasies had spilled over into real life, Chase thought grimly. Which meant that whatever was happening on pediatrics was down to him, or perhaps to his grim little posse of teenage girls. Time to make the little bastard talk, and then get his friends banned from the hospital.

* * * * * * *


	8. Eight

Author's note: A couple of people have mentioned this now, so I thought I'd better mention what I'm crossover-ing (for those of you unfamiliar with Renfield). But just in case there's anyone who'd rather not know for some reason--because it would give too much away, or maybe you'd just rather guess--I'm going to stick it in an author's note at the bottom of this page, with enough spoiler space that you can ignore it if you want.

Chase's day went from surreal directly to hellish, only without getting any less surreal. He reached Renfield's room to a chorus of sobbing from the ward nurses. Foreman met him at the room door. "His spine was broken," he said, sounding as if he were fighting for calm through a lot of anger.

"What?" For just a moment Chase was so baffled he wasn't even sure who they were talking about any more. Glancing past Foreman he saw Renfield on the bed, motionless and white; no one had yet covered the body. "But that doesn't make any sense, Foreman. How the hell could that have happened?"

Foreman gave him a pitying look. "He's been murdered, Chase," he said patiently.

* * * * * * *

At least the three girls weren't outside House's door. That was a small mercy; Chase couldn't have endured drama-teen hysteria just now. And if they hadn't been hysterical--if they'd reacted to their friend's death with indifference--he might have choked one of them.

They'd just dropped Renfield and moved on, he reminded himself. It wasn't nice, but teenagers weren't always nice. There was nothing sinister about it, and there was no reason for the creeping fear he'd felt at the thought of them. Right?

His hands were shaking, he realized. This whole situation was unsettling him.

Forcing himself to breathe calmly, Chase entered the room. House was asleep, a still figure beneath the blankets. Chase shivered in the cool air, and waited a moment, but House showed no sign of waking.

For one childish moment Chase wanted to shake him awake, to force someone else to be the grownup and, just for once, take some responsibility away from him. He thought of his father, shook off a surge of despair, and reminded himself that House was, well, House: not exactly an empathetic shoulder to cry on at the best of times, and injured now, and with his own busload of depression to cope with.

Back in the hall, he found Foreman had followed him, and was waiting patiently. His spirits lifted, just a little.

* * * * * * *

"The whole thing with Renfield makes no sense. Nothing happening around here makes any sense." Foreman still sounded angry. "No one saw anything, Chase. Not one person noticed anyone near his room, and yet someone walked in and broke his back like a matchstick. How is that even possible?"

"What I need," Chase mused, "is House." They'd ended up back in Diagnostics, by habit, or perhaps seeking the comfort of familiarity. Except now it was cluttered up with the three new doctors, all seated around the table, cooling their heels while House recovered.

"Not an option," Foreman pointed out.

"Or someone who thinks just like House," Chase continued.

Foreman, sounding slightly relieved, said what they were both thinking, "There's no one who thinks _just_ like House."

House's three teaching fellows had been politely pretending to ignore their conversation, but at this point Kutner spoke up. "Actually," he said, setting down his newspaper, "there kind of is. His name's Henry Dobson. Doctor Wilson probably has his number."

* * * * * * *

Henry Dobson wasn't even a doctor. Chase couldn't tell who was more annoyed, himself for having called him in, or Cuddy for having been summoned to meet with them. She had dark circles under her eyes, Chase noted, and the weary look of someone who has to shoulder the blame for a situation completely beyond her control. "There's a murder investigation going on upstairs," she was pointing out, "and we have children claiming to have been lured away from pediatrics. This is really not an optimal time for me to sit around talking about House."

And yet she didn't leave, Chase noted, which made him suspect that on some level she enjoyed talking about House. "You've visited him, since the accident. Did you notice anything different?" He'd meant the girls sitting in the hall, but Cuddy answered as if she assumed this must be about House himself.

"Of course he's different. He's devastated. He blames himself for Amber's death, and Wilson...." She let the sentence trail off, unable or unwilling to find words to describe the damage done to his friendship with Wilson.

"And you spent a lot of time sitting with him?" Dobson asked. Cuddy looked annoyed, as if she suspected the question implied something but she couldn't be sure what.

"We're friends," she said. "He's my employee. I'm concerned about him. Of course I spent a lot of time sitting with him."

"Of course you did," Dobson said soothingly. "And Doctor Wilson...?"

"Hasn't been around," Cuddy said, sounding tired and worried. Dobson looked sympathetic, but whatever he felt didn't stop him from questioning her--which was, Cuddy thought, eerily like House himself.

"And the other doctors--House's teaching fellows--they've been to see him as well?" he asked.

"They've dropped in, yes, but not for long," Cuddy said. "There's nothing they can do. And I think it upsets his team to see him like this. I _know_ it irritates him to have them watching him. At first I let them see him more often, since while he's recovering they have less to do, but I finally told them they were of more use doing some clinic duty than hanging around staring at him."

"Interesting," Dobson said, and left.

* * * * * * *

"I see your observation skills haven't improved any, " Dobson said calmly, pouring himself a coffee and looking annoyingly at home in Diagnostics. "Just goes to show you: even professionals only see what they expect to see."

Taub flared up predictably. "Renfield wasn't even our patient," he snapped. "It wasn't our job to observe him."

"I wasn't talking about Renfield," Dobson replied, sounding maddeningly amused. Even more maddeningly, he left without explaining what he'd meant.

You'd think, Henry thought, as he headed downstairs to find Doctor Chase, that with all these qualified doctors around the place, _someone_ would have noticed some of the pertinent changes in House.

Like how he was walking and talking but not actually breathing, for instance.

* * * * * * *

Author's Note: Hi again. So, about that whole crossover thing in the title:

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This is basically a smush of House MD and Dracula. Chase is more or less playing the role of Jonathan Harker (I'll skip going into who everyone else is supposed to be for now, so as not to bore you all to death). So it's the settings and characters of House, living through some of the events of Dracula. (Yes, I know that's odd, but not as odd as that House/Twilight oneshot I did.)


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